The path the professionals should choose
The last column of the run. Victor Ivan turns from politicians to professionals — lawyers, engineers, accountants, auditors — and argues that no one should be trusted to fix the country who has not first fixed their own field.
Choosing destruction instead of salvation
COPE’s daily hearings show where the money went. Victor Ivan notes that everyone is shouting at someone to go home and nobody is asking anyone to take charge.
Alleviating the burden of the crisis
Eight practical measures for living through the crisis — fuel rationing, public transport, solar conversion for expatriate-owned homes — inside a case for an all-party government.
The elephant, goat and the rope
Rohan Samarajiva answers back, so Victor Ivan sets out the case against independent commissions in detail, drawing on India and Hong Kong to show what an appointing body has to be before it can work.
There is no cure for stupidity!
Reading the Budget, Victor Ivan finds no vision in it beyond holding on to power, and repeats that cutting imports is not a solution to a balance of payments crisis — going to the IMF is.
Pandemic and crimes
Sri Lanka had every advantage against the pandemic and squandered them. Victor Ivan reads the COVID statistics, the discrepancies in them, and a set of crimes he calls mysterious.
The crisis and agriculture
What could be done for agriculture if the fertiliser ban were lifted: co-operative societies, the wild animal problem, dairy and beef, dhal and chillies, and paddy. A practical column, unusually free of politics.
Halting the use of chemical fertiliser
The overnight fertiliser ban. Victor Ivan sets the President’s organic dream against the history of paddy cultivation and the chemistry of soil, and warns of the harvest that will follow.
Structural reforms key to recreating the State and the social system
COVID as an index of state failure. Victor Ivan reads the handling of the pandemic, the soldiers placed over the civil service and the growing dependence on China as symptoms of one structural collapse.
Alas, Sri Lanka!
Victor Ivan recounts taking the collapse of the state to the Speaker, to the Auditor General and finally to the Supreme Court with 62 signatures behind him, and being met each time with silence.